In the days after a computer virus is unleashed, we’ve come to expect the same scene. A hacker is led away in handcuffs. Detailed accounts are released about his dreams of mayhem (typically petty), his juvenile erotic fantasies, his pathetic life. He never has ideas or ambitions. He’s just a boy, staging little battles against authority — and women. There’s a vaguely rapist mentality at work in such incidents: The perpetrator is bent on forced intrusion. But in the history of crime, these guys are barely worth mentioning.
The ‘ILOVEYOU’ virus has changed all that. It’s important to take a moment to appreciate the most costly “bug” in the history of cyberspace. Real psychological insight went into the design. Emotions were used and manipulated with precision. No lone masturbatory hacker was behind this one. It was, very likely, a woman. And if it wasn’t a woman, it was a creature even more dangerous: a man who thinks like one.
The computer virus, to date, has suffered from a lack of finesse characteristic of ordinary men. A year ago, for example, the “Melissa” virus (named after a stripper) presented itself as an “important message” from a friend. Once opened it said, “Here is the document you asked for … don’t show anyone else.” The attached document showed a list of passwords to porn sites. So tedious. So banal.
More prominent viruses since then have been, in artistic terms, even worse. One virus imitated the Y2K bug — yawn. The “Bubbleboy” virus (named after an episode of “Seinfeld”) featured striking technical innovations but was aimed only at mocking the defenses of Microsoft Outlook. Virus authors, en masse, seem to think that the dominance of Bill Gates in cyberspace is the one issue worth making a statement about. They have no largeness of purpose, no sense of mission.
But the virus that crippled the world last week was sheer art, a poem enclosing a disease. Every detail was perfect. Even the capitalization and lack of spaces — ILOVEYOU — made the apparent confession seem rushed, urgent, heartfelt. And underneath was the cruel awareness that for love — or, rather, the promise of love, the thin hint of love — the defenses of maturity fall away. Love will conquer all, and the lover first.
“The people who got bitten by the lovebug virus remind me of a 15-year-old girl whose boyfriend promises to love her forever if she’ll just have sex with him,” says Wendy Keller, author of “The Cult of the Born-Again Virgin.” In this virus, we see a time-tested truth illustrated once again: Passion regresses us to childhood. Everyone from diplomats and generals to lowly office workers fell prey to this Freudian magic.
Great statements on love recognize this duality: We see a path is wrong but take it anyway. “And though I never cease complaining of her/I swear I cannot manage not to love her,” Alceste says in “The Misanthrope.” We are not compelled to love — the rub is that we act on our own. And the danger even intensifies the wish.
Such themes have largely fallen out of public consciousness. The love virus hints at older truths. For the ancient Greeks, as Bruce S. Thornton writes in “Eros,” “sexual desire is a plague, a syndrome like AIDS that attacks the body and mind on several different fronts, ultimately leading, as with Heracles and Phaedra, to death.” Or to $10 billion in damages, which actually impresses us more.
Reports over the weekend indicated that the virus’ author was a woman. Now the Philippine police say they suspect that the virus was created by a group of people. The crucial question facing us, then, is who will play the enamored hacker in the movie version.
I really think the role belongs to a woman.
In the history of art, great manipulators have always been female. Think Catherine Tramell in “Basic Instinct” or the Marquise de Merteuil in “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Women, not men, are the masters of treachery, ruse and the attending heartbreak in the history of love. They’re truly impressive. And even when men rise to such levels of craft, they give credit where it’s due. “Oh, women, women!” Valmont says to the marquise. “Every treachery we employ is stolen from you.”
I, for one, want to give this person a hearty thank you. With this latest virus we were reminded of things we’d rather forget. “Happy love has no history,” Denis de Rougemont tells us in his great, dark tome “Love in the Western World.” In cyberspace, despite the space between bodies, that history will be no different.
Recently, it occurred to me that I’ve never written a love letter. It being Valentine’s Day and all, I thought that perhaps I should, if only to say that I’ve done so. The love letter is one of the great literary genres, I reasoned, and a budding writer like myself ought to have at least one to his name. The problem, as with many literary endeavors, turned out to be defining my target audience.
A fellow on the bus recently asked me if there’s “anyone special” in my life. “Just me,” I chortled.
That’s when I hatched my brilliant plan.
My mother was naturally aghast. Having a son who writes a love letter to himself is, of course, not a mother’s dream come true. Her fondest hope — not an entirely original one, but deeply held nonetheless — is to see me “settled down” with a wife and assorted progeny who, she maintains, she’ll extravagantly indulge. This latest development in my romantic life didn’t seem to further her admittedly admirable goals. My subsequent attempts to elicit help from her in composing my love letter — effective phrasing, sensitive pacing, etc. — were pointedly rejected. I asked to see the letters that my father had written to her. She refused.
So I set about to compose my words of love to myself by myself. Intense self-absorption, I’ve observed, is a virtue in letters of love. This, of course, I have in abundance. Nevertheless, the first drafts of my love letter were disasters. Witness this aborted mess:
Dear Jon,I can’t live without you.
I was coming on too strong. This letter lacked that tone of joyful abandon, that certain joie de vivre that makes love so appealing in its nascent stages. One should save obsessiveness for after you’ve gotten to know each other better. Relationships take time. Romeo, after all, didn’t kill himself at the beginning of the play; he had to work up to it. It’s called dramatic tension. Finally I hit on my new opening line:
Dear Jon,How are you?
This seemed far superior in every way. I come across as interested without being clingy. And just in case I ever decide to rewrite this love letter as a musical, note how easily “How are you?” converts into lyrics, rhyming as it does with a wide variety of courtship behaviors and romantic passions — woo, coo, rue, blue. (Not to mention certain legal actions — sue, due — that, regrettably but frequently, follow romances in the modern world.)
I relayed this promising first sentence to my mother, adding that it, of course, needed to be developed further, but she should feel free to comment.
When I didn’t hear back from her, I continued to my third revision on my own.
Love letters, I’ve noticed, are full of endless chatter about nothing. This flow of verbiage is intended to obscure the anxiety one feels at the prospect of being (or not being) desired. In his misogynist but otherwise charming manner, Valmont, the hero of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” says of his own letter-writing efforts: “I talked as nonsensically as possible, for without nonsense there is no tenderness; and that, I believe, is the reason why women are so superior to us in writing love letters.” In my best imitation of a nonsensical 18th century Frenchwoman, I set about doing just that:
Dear Jon,How are you? I so enjoyed the day we spent together yesterday. I really think we’ve got something special. Not that I’m asking for a commitment.
I felt this letter had spawned even more layers of ambiguity, which became more disastrous with each syllable. I sent it off to my mother, pointedly noting that her suggestions would be useful.
But still she was silent.
In my solipsistic rage, I generated draft after draft of my love letter. Each eventually turned into a rant against my own inadequacies — a common enough stratagem in love letters. To make oneself seem pathetic is the oldest trick in the book. Love chugs along smoothly when one lover encourages the perception that the other is stronger. In my case, it was difficult to determine the dominant party.
I had just about given up. Finally, I received my inspiration in the morning mail. My mother had been listening all along. At long last, she had taken it upon herself to respond.
I had to applaud her terse assessment of my efforts: “My son, you are 24 years old. Live.”
Enclosed was a love letter my father had sent her. And, boy, was it a beauty:
I write in this early morning hour, parted from you for just a while, yet missing you terribly, consoled only by the image of you resting and dreaming of me — a greater gift than I thought I could ever have, far more than I ever hoped for and infinitely more than I deserve. And yet, there it is. What a gift, a blessing, a miracle we have in love. Happy Valentine’s Day, my darling. Sobering as it was, even this didn’t have the desired effect. Even my own father was more romantic than I.
How right Hesiod was to describe Eros as the god “who breaks the limbs’ strength” and “overpowers the intelligence in the breast.” I concluded that I could distinguish myself as a young writer working in other genres. So I went to the grocery store and, alongside the hordes of married men, bought a Hallmark card for my beloved, and left it at that.
Those of us who adore Martha Stewart can only wonder how long it will be before she takes over the entire world. On our own little calendars (portable, presentable, a shade of minty green), we make notes on her progress. This week, of course, she became a billionaire. After Martha herself rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange, like Queen Elizabeth waving off the fleets, shares of her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., jumped 95 percent.
For all her demure talk of how “the brand,” more than she, mattered, investors all over the free world chanted, “Long live Martha.” We who adore her said it first.
She has two new TV shows in the works. A cooking show on the Cable Food Network, featuring two hosts (neither Martha but both, with any luck, distinctly Martha-like), will instruct on the finer points of couture cuisine. And what’s more exciting, a daily children’s show will work to cultivate an audience that has to date been grossly underexposed to America’s lifestyle queen. Enhancements to her radio show, retail outlets and “very fine Internet presence” also are continuing apace.
What’s more, Martha is becoming a movie star.
I’ve long thought it one of fate’s more terrible cruelties that in the ’60s, Alfred Hitchcock didn’t catch a glimpse of the young Martha Kostyra as she made the rounds at New York modeling agencies. His career, if not Hollywood itself, might have been saved some wear and tear. (She’d have needed a little help to become blond, but then, who doesn’t?)
But recently we’ve learned that Barry Sonnenfeld (“Men in Black,” “Wild, Wild West”) has been using Martha as a template for the heroine in his remake of “Another Man’s Poison,” the 1951 Bette Davis thriller. In the original, a mystery writer kills her estranged husband, then is blackmailed by an escaped convict into letting him pose as her new squeeze. Sonnenfeld plans to turn Davis’ role into lifestyle guru à la Martha. The role doesn’t seem as snug a fit as, say, a remake of “Mildred Pierce,” the 1945 Joan Crawford masterpiece, which doesn’t make the mistake of letting a mere man dominate the diva. But the project seems promising.
And finally, Showtime is in talks with Mare Winningham over an adaptation of “Just Desserts,” the 1997 unauthorized biography by Jerry Oppenheimer (and a source of great equivocation for devoted Marthaphiles).
Our Martha will not likely be watching any of it. She was widely believed to be opposed to ABC’s plans in 1996 for a sitcom, “Style and Substance,” that was to have been centered around a Martha-like character (played by Kathleen Turner). She was even rumored to have influenced the network to drop the idea.
A few years ago, such a project would have had an entirely different purpose: making a clown out of a woman whose excesses seemed foolish at first. Now, with each new success, Martha’s become more and more mythic, a goddess an entire culture bends to please.
“She’s in a struggle with the gods!” says a friend of mine. “She fights nature and man and life and death and still finds time to plant the daffodils.” And even the more practically minded realize how the word “billionaire” can dignify the silliest of people. Look at what it did for Bill Gates.
I am increasingly convinced that future women’s studies majors will first be assigned “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan’s screed against full-time homemaking, and then be directed to read the book that reverses it point by point: “Martha Stewart’s Entertaining.” Tuesday night on Charlie Rose’s talk show, Martha, exuberant over her company’s new standing, addressed this very issue when she was asked about her mission:
“I was serving a desire — not only mine, but every homemaker’s desire, to elevate that job of homemaker,” said Martha. “It was floundering, I think. And we all wanted to escape it, to get out of the house, get that high-paying job and pay somebody else to do everything that we didn’t think was really worthy of our attention. And all of a sudden I realized: It was terribly worthy of our attention.”
Sigh.
Clearly, it must be acknowledged, the implications of Martha’s mission are large, and with people throwing money at her to expand her empire, she seems well positioned to forge ahead, bringing new converts to her well-appointed tent. She may even discover that the world doesn’t need to be conquered after all. With the occasional hurdle, it was just waiting there for her, an oyster stuffed with garlic-cilantro pesto, all along.
